THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
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some who are half dead and ought to be in institutions, some who
are perfectly able-bodied and have simply chosen that profession,
and it is very rare for Romans not to give to them, at least a few
times every day. They do not give out of kindness or because anyone
is deserving, there is no buying of conscience in it, they just give;
it is another kind of flowing out, and if the beggars were properly
taken care of, as has been tried sometimes, everybody would feel that
a natural outlet had been blocked and they had been somehow shut
back in themselves; it would be as if something had gone wrong
with their speech, or one of the big fountains were dry. There is no
more outlandish sight in Rome than an American refusing a beggar.
The trouble is, it is very kind, this flowing ritualized amoral
and unromantic community, which did not have to learn not to judge
one's neighbor; it seems never to have heard of the idea; and in
which individual kindness is unnecessary and practically unheard-of–
what looks like it is often just genuine enjoyment of other people's
business. That is what is upsetting, it makes social improvement so dif–
ficult; there is not much room for busybodies or any false charity.
The beggars know that their work has that profound use and dignity
and would howl with derision at a Swede who tried to put them in
an institution, but the Swede and the Swiss are the great comic types
in Rome anyway. Better Hell, or a home in the Tarpeian caves and
a dog's bowl at noon at the back door of the monastery, than to be
out of the big swim.
The urinals are shocking.
Go up the hill from Trastevere and sit at the Bar Gianicolo,
across from the papal walls and the Porta San Pancrazio; that is
the newest and dumpiest of the city gates, a petty-bourgeois-triumphal
arch in stucco, still it marks an exit, and you are really in the
country there; the bar is a village bar; the vegetation is thick and
casual: trees, an arbor to sit under in summer, wisteria and azaleas
falling from the roof, capers and other shrubbery
in
the city wall. But
this can happen inside the walls too; it is another mysterious kind–
ness of the city that for all its staggering recent growth and harsh
new sections like the one that begins a few blocks from here, in a
few minutes from almost anywhere you can be in a country place,
not parks, nothing kept up or planned, but real ones; real country
